


We Will Never Save The World: Torchwood

by alexiel_neesan



Series: We Will Never Save The World [3]
Category: DCU, Torchwood
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Wordcount: Over 1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-10
Updated: 2011-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexiel_neesan/pseuds/alexiel_neesan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place roughly after the second season of Torchwood. It begins with <a href="http://pics.livejournal.com/alexiel_neesan/pic/0003xe74/g35">this page from Robin #177</a>... what happens next... are many different stories.</p><p><em>Adrift. It's how what happened to them is called, there. There's a name, but there's no answer.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	We Will Never Save The World: Torchwood

Jason slips into the room undetected, without a sound. He has toed his boots off in the room that is an entry hall, the living room and the kitchen all in one, has put his leather on the back of the couch. He takes his shirts off, then his pants, then his socks and underwear.

He slips into the bed and the other occupant blinks at him in the night lights of the city.

" 'hat... Jay? Izzit time for my shift...?"

Jason puts his arms around the smaller frame, smells shampoo and soap. "No, it's been wrapped. Day off tomorrow. Go back to sleep."

And Tim does.

+

Tim wakes up... - well, he does not wake up with the sun. Sure, the bedroom (and the other does-everything room) have a wall that is nothing but windows (and Jay and he have spent a lot of time replacing the plain glass with bullet-proof one-way-vision glass found through Ianto, as well as the traps and alarms required), but all there is to see right now is overcast skies and a gray city. It looks like it will rain.

There is a hand smoothing his hair over and over, softly, and an arm across his body, heavy and reassuring.

"Did I dream the part where you said 'day off'?" He says. He does not open his eyes just yet - he knows what he is going to see.  

"You didn't," answers Jason, his breath on the back of Tim's neck, the skin so pale here, pale like all of Tim.

"We don't have days off."

"Sure we do."

"No, we don't."

"You're calling down jinx on us."

"No. Calling down jinx would be saying 'I sure hope Jack isn't going to call because of a lost alien ship/a Weevil in the Millenium Stadium/an unexpected Rift spike-"

Jason shuts him up. There was one more thing to add to the list, but they do not talk about it much. Or is it 'anymore'?

Right now they are much more busy.

+

Jay has a thing for Ianto's accent. That the guy rocks suits and can be a mean son of a bitch does not hurt. He is like a younger Alfred who is also fucking the boss; and Jason managed to completely gross himself out drawing parallels. Tim laughs at him, the little fucker.

He can not say the same about Gwen - sure, she is pretty kickass and fun, and the freckles are all kinds of hot, but she doesn't... It's not them that she sees; it's not Jason and Tim. It's two young men who will never be able to go back home, two boys who got dumped into a completely different universe. The mothering gets seriously tiring after a while. Then there's the look behind Tim's eyes when she's on a mothering-high, like he wants to leave, he's confused, he wants to hold on and he is not sure he is _allowed_ to.

They do not talk about that, either.

+

It ends in the shower, of course. The cubicle is barely large enough for the both of them to fit in, and acrobatics got banned from there fairly quickly into the moving in.  

The apartment looks like when they moved in, too. There is maybe more clothes and the odd gun out, a couple books and a mug with a broken handle. It doesn't look like there are two people living there - they aren't here most of the time after all. But the view is worth it (it is still not Gotham), the neighbourhood is quiet (since Jason punched three guys and sent two more to the closest ER) and it is their. They still do not call it home.

+

Jason is not allowed to feel jealous of a computer system. He knows it's more than a little stupid, he knows it. But intellectual knowledge and emotions are two vastly different things. So he is indeed jealous of the computer system Tim spends most of his time on. It does not help that Tim has taken to call the system 'Tosh' and that the only other person able to run it at full capacity is Jack, leading to Jack and Tim conspiring about stuff more often than not.

When it gets too much, Jason goes down to the shooting range, and imagine Jack's face on the targets. He would like to shoot Jack sometimes -it's not like Jack would not gasp back to life in the next five minutes- but he likes Ianto and Ianto's coffee, and the brief and temporary satisfaction of the kill would not be worth the glares and being cut from the black nectar. He has not doubts Ianto would be more than capable of thinking out and acting on others very efficient plans of revenge, too.

+

"Why are you staying?" asks Tim. He is sitting in the couch - not on, never on; the thing swallow you whole and makes it difficult to be spat back; Jason took to call it 'the black hole'.

He still looks too pale, even if it's been two weeks since he got knocked out and turned into a live battery by a device they had recovered and that Jack had said was 'off and won't harm anyone'. It had been, off that is, until Gwen had touched it back at the Hub with her bare hands, and the thing had literally jumped at Tim. Jason would really have shot Jack, at that moment, if he hadn't been cradling Tim's unresponsive body. It had felt like holding a corpse.

Jason knows better than to get eaten by the couch, so he leans on the back of it, his mug in one hand, staring at Tim. Tim's cheek is smooth, just shaved, against the back of his hand.

"Jack's security protocols were written by a fucking five years old on crack. The alternative is too fucking scary to think about."

"You're still thinking about that?" Tim's eyebrows knot together, a severe line.

"Don't tell me you're going to defend the man. He's the only one who can't die around here, and it sounds like he forgets it too often."

"I've been working on updates."

Jason snorts. He circles the couch and falls half on it, half on Tim, his mug puts down on the floor.

"Why are you staying, Jason?" Tim has a lock of Jason's hair in his fingers.

"Wanna get out? It's our day off after all... I don't think pub crawling is up your alley, but we could drive to Bristol. Or go to the beach before it rains," Jason says.

"Jay," says Tim, tugging at his hair. He still looks too pale.

"Tim," Jay says, and they are nose to nose, staring at each other. Jason brings his hands up, carefully, takes Tim's head in between them. _Where would I go?_ Why _would I go?_ "Tim," he repeats. "Do you want me to go?"

Tim swallows, his adam's apple bobbing against the long lines of his neck. His eyes take that flat and blank quality Jason hates, the one where Tim is... somewhere, anywhere, but not here.

"Tim," repeats Jason, and he presses his hands a little against Tim's face, strokes the cheekbones with his thumbs. He catches Tim's eyes, and Tim's behind there, hiding the freaking out, not hiding enough. "I don't need to go anywhere. I don't want to."

There's still the worst kind of confusion in the blue. When they kiss, Tim kisses like he's drowning.

+

After they arrived, after the apparent situation was explained to them and they were allowed out of the Hub - and that they got full access to modern communications, including the Internet, and realized Gotham did not exist - ... Jason left.

He left the country completely, and Torchwood Three was totally baffled at how Jason had managed to do so without them being aware of it, without Jason showing up on any of the CCTV in the city, without him raising alarms. Tim did not enlighten them. He asked to be allowed to see the archives and all things relevant to displaced persons by the Rift. Jack accepted, at the express condition Tim told Jack the truth about him and Jason, and for Tim to work for Torchwood for as long as he was here.

The truth was carefully edited, and Tim quickly figured out that he -they- were here to stay.

Temporal displacements caused by the Rift, a breach in space and time running through Cardiff and responsible for as much weirdness as in Gotham, were not unheard off. The very last case Torchwood Three had had was very detailled, up to the end. Or ends, as it was. One had killed himself, one had left to live in London, where she still was, and the last one had flew back into the Rift, hoping to go back, or to go somewhere else. There were also people plucked from Cardiff and around, dumped back minutes to a few years later, aged much more than the time they had been gone, most of them driven to madness by the things they had seen and lived.

Dimensional displacements now...

There was not enough information, not enough documents, not enough artifacts, not enough of it photographed, scanned, numerized. He stayed there, in the subbasements of the Hub, under the Plaza, under Cardiff.

Ianto dragged him out more than once. Tim slept on the couch in the Hub, at Ianto's sometimes, under Ianto's watchful eye. Tim tried to tell him he was okay, it really wasn't the worse thing that had happened to him -had happened to them-  but the words didn't came out right and he could only say thank you for the coffee, and the clothes, and the place to sleep.

Jason comes back one night Tim is sleeping at Ianto's. It's already dark, has been for a few hours now, when Jason takes the last steps to the flat. He knocks on the door and waits, listening for the sounds inside. It sounds like one person, crossing a room - and it stops, just behind the door.

Then the rattling of a key, of a chain, and Jason doesn't mistake the black taser in the hand of the man who opens for anything else than what it is. The guy's name's Ianto Jones, and finding his place had been the easiest thing to do since they arrived here. Torchwood should review their security.

"Tim's here?" He asks. Ianto stares at him. Jason can't see much of the flat in the ajar door. It looks clean. Airy. He can guess there is a couch, maybe.

He stares back at the guy. He can hear soft steps, behind what's hidden by the door. Ianto looks back and then close the door, removes the chain and opens it in full.

Tim's at the door of a room - bedroom, probably. Jason knows the kid got vampiric tendencies that being around Bruce didn't help, but he looks like a living dead now. He's staring at Jason, still outside the door.

Jason steps in. Ianto closes the door behind him, stays there. Jason can't see the taser anymore, but it can't have gone far.

"So now what?" Asks Jason. He has a duffle bag slung over his shoulder and the strap's digging into the articulation. He hasn't slept on the flight back from the US, could use a shower and a shave.

There hadn't been anything to find, in those United States, in this universe. New York is there, missing a couple streets and buildings. Chicago is there. San Francisco is there, minus a tower. The roads to Metropolis don't exist, are lost in the middle of fields and prairies. The roads to Gotham are there, but it's like Gotham has been ripped out of the map and the edges smoothed back together, no more hole anywhere.  
There is no Gotham here, it has never existed.

Tim is still staring at him, from the other side of the couch and the room. Then he's staring at the floor.

There isn't much more to ask or do.

+

They end up going to eat at a brasserie overseeing the bay, a couple hundred meters from the Hub. Tim needs to get out more, and not only for work related reasons, not that there's ever a lot of sun around here. Jason goads him into sharing a ice cream, and then they walk down around the bay. The water's dark, spraying fine cold mist. It's missing something to feel like the Gotham's docks - maybe a drug deal or two, and a vat of toxic wastes - but it's familiar. Maybe even calming.

The Hub isn't that far - the roof of the Millenium Center can be guessed from there. Tim doesn't shrug the arm Jason passes on his shoulders, doesn't move, really.

"Jason...," he begins, his eyes at sea.

"Yeah?" Jason looks at him. It has been easier than he would have thought to see Tim, and not a random person who had replaced him. Too easy, maybe, but now that Jason got him, he won't let go, unless Tim wants him to.

Tim doesn't want much. Jason had been afraid it was depression, when all ways back were clearly closed, with the way technology was behind when compared to their world, answers were behind and then gone. Tim just didn't want things for himself, didn't even think about wanting things.

Tim frowns a bit. "Nothing." But he relaxes into Jay's hold and shifts a bit closer.

/end  



End file.
